Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for September, 2015…

Malice at the Palace (Her Royal Spyness #9), by Rhys Bowen – I always love a visit to Georgie, and this one was no exception.  Left without a place to stay (again), Georgie is relieved when Queen Mary has another assignment for her – and this one involves living at Kensington Palace!  Georgie will be looking after Princess Marina of Greece, intended bride of Prince George.  It’s a plum assignment, but things get a bit dicey when the body of one of Prince George’s former lovers winds up in the palace courtyard.  With no shortage of possible suspects, solving this mystery will test all of Georgie’s ingenuity.  These mysteries are so much fun.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal – Eva Thorvald is the mysterious chef behind one of the most sought-after dinner invitations in the world, but how did she develop her flawless palate?  In a series of connected, but not quite, sequential stories, Stradal focuses on one personality and one part of Eva’s life at a time.  Sometimes Eva is a starring player in the story; other times she only makes a cameo appearance.  The stories were well-crafted, the characters very real.  I enjoyed this.

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski – Yawwwwwwwwn.  Sorry, but this was a total slog for me.  It might be because I tried to read it while I was exhausted from sleepless night after sleepless night… but I’ve read other nonfiction since Nugget’s birth, and this was the first that really couldn’t hold my attention.  I liked the Tolkien parts, but the Lewis sections were depressing (kill heroes much?) and I couldn’t care less about the other Inklings.  Skip this and read LOTR instead.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua – I heard about this on the All the Books! podcast, and it did not disappoint.  Padua started writing a web comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, two Victorian scientists who were famous as genius eccentrics in their day.  Babbage almost invented the first computer, and Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron!) wrote code for the nonexistent machine.  Babbage was a failure and Lovelace died young, and Padua was bumming hard about that, so she invented a parallel “pocket universe” in which Lovelace and Babbage became an intrepid crime-solving team with the help of their computer.  IT.  WAS.  AWESOME.  (The George Eliot chapter was my favorite, obviously.  “Pray do not corrupt the cats with poetry.)  Love.  Love love love love love.  Please do a sequel, Sydney, pretty please with equations on top?

No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years Into Cherished Moments With Your Kids, by Harley A. Rotbart – I blew through this one pretty quickly, and it was mostly common sense.  I’m always on the lookout for ways to make more memories with my family – the little ones are growing up so fast, and it’s hard being away from them all day – so I figured I’d pick up some suggestions here.  I probably did, but I’ve forgotten all of them.  Want my advice?  Skip reading this book, and just go make the darn memories already.

Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby, by Tracy Hogg – Ugh.  So, I thought this was great while I was reading this, until I started feeling inadequate.  Really inadequate.  Really, really inadequate.  And then I mentioned some of the Baby Whisperer’s sleep theory to the kids’ pediatrician, and he gave it major side-eye.  A book that gets the stinkeye from the doctor and makes me feel like a lousy mother is… not recommended.

The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton – Read for my #FallingForEdith readalong, I won’t necessarily say I enjoyed the story of acquisitive, brash, social-climbing Undine Spragg.  In fact, she was kind of a… well, it rhymes with “itch.”  But the writing was spectacular (as usual, it’s Edith Wharton after all), the world was glittering and real, and I was glued to the book because, although I hated Undine, I just had to know what was going to happen.  The Custom of the Country might have been a book about unpleasant people, but it didn’t cool me on Edith Wharton at all.  Now I want to read The House of Mirth.

Adventure Time, Volume 1, by Ryan North – I have been hearing great things about this all-ages comic, so I finally checked it out.  It was pretty cute!  I especially liked Marceline the Vampire Queen (she’s over 1,000 years old, be cool, okay?).  But I have a feeling that a lot of the jokes were lost on me.  I guess there’s a TV show, and if you don’t watch it, big chunks of the comic won’t make sense?  I dunno – I guess that’s true, because I found this adorable but kind of confusing.

Fables, Volume 1: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham – Fables is a classic comic, and I figured I’d enjoy it because I always like new twists on familiar stories.  This one was great.  It was framed as a murder mystery – who killed Rose Red? – but also introduced a larger world.  All of the characters we remember from fairy tales have been exiled from Fairyland and are now living in Fabletown, a secret enclave in New York City.  King Cole is the Mayor, but he’s pretty much a figurehead – Snow White runs the show, with Bigby (Big B, Big Bad, get it?) Wolf as the Sheriff.  Prince Charming is a despicable rake, Beauty and the Beast are constantly fighting, and Fabletown itself is sort of hanging by a thread.  This comic stretched out over 22 volumes (with several spinoff series) and I hear it get better and better.  I can’t wait to dive deeper into this world – I already have the second and third volumes checked out of the library and waiting in my stack.

Not too shabby for the first month back at work!  I’m enjoying exploring a bit more of the world of comics.  It’s been a great way for me to read and meet new characters, but in manageable chunks of time.  (The next few months should be great ones for comics – the next trade paperback of Lumberjanes comes out on my birthday, and November will see several Star Wars trades released.  I can’t wait!)  The comics were sort of the highlights of the month, but I also enjoyed visiting with Georgie again, and Kitchens of the Great Midwest was a lovely read (it made me want to cook).  One thing’s clear, though – I have to lay off the parenting books.  They’re making me feel rotten and inadequate.  I do have a few more that I’m sort of interested in reading, but I’m taking a break for now.  With everything I have going on, I just want to read what I’m excited about – and at the moment, that’s mostly comics.  Next month, I think I’ll have some good stuff to share – I’ve already read a couple of great books in October.

Considered by many to be Edith Wharton’s masterpiece, The Custom of the Country follows an acquisitive, social-climbing anti-heroine from marriage to marriage.  When the novel opens, Undine Spragg, recently of Apex (a vaguely middle-American town) is living with her parents in New York City, navigating the social mores of the “stylish” set who have been closed off to her up until that point.  Undine’s father, Mr. Spragg, is rich and indulges his daughter – after a bit of fighting, maybe – in most of her whims.  Undine, for her part, is ambitious and striving, much like the young USA of the day.  (According to the introduction in the edition I read, it’s no coincidence that Undine Spragg shares her initials with United States.)  A lucky break – the quiet admiration of Ralph Marvell, one of New York society’s favorite sons – introduces Undine into the American aristocracy on which she has set her sights.  A whirlwind courtship later, they’re married and Undine is pregnant.  But Ralph, while he may be part of the exclusive crowd to which Undine is desperate to belong, is not rich – and so he soon proves to be a “disappointment” to his wife.  And instead of swallowing her “disappointment,” or – gasp! – learning to budget, Undine takes a not-quite-socially-acceptable-yet plunge and divorces Ralph.  Her next marriage, to a French Marquis, doesn’t fare much better – after brash American Undine makes a major faux pas by pressing her husband to sell some family heirlooms (so as to keep her Paris seasons in rich style) another break seems inevitable.  The novel ends – spoiler alert! – with Undine married to a billionaire from Apex who… it turns out… was actually her first husband!  WHAT!

My thoughts, which seem to lend themselves to bullet point form for this review:

• Wharton has written a novel made up almost exclusively of unlikable characters.  I did like poor Ralph Marvell, and Clare Van Degen (repenting her marriage in diamonds) as well.  And I felt for poor Mr. Spragg, trying so hard to make ends meet in New York over the demands of his wife and daughter.  And that was pretty much it.  Now, usually, I’m a fairly character-driven reader.  If I can’t root for the main character, I find it hard to stick with a book.  There have been one or two notable exceptions, and this was one of them.  (W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil was the other.)  While I disliked Undine intensely (and that seemed to be the universal reaction) I really respected the literary achievement of making me hang with an unlikable character.  (I think that’s also what Jane Austen is trying to do, to a certain extent, in Emma – she famously wrote that she had created a heroine nobody but her would much like – but she falls short because, while Emma is an engaging novel, Emma herself is a far more likable protagonist than Wharton’s Undine.  Emma is flawed, but good at heart and pretty charming.  Undine is flawed, not good at heart, and really quite off-putting.)
• Thanks to the introduction’s pointing it out, I was very aware of Undine’s representation of brash American-ness throughout the book.  (I quit reading the introduction shortly after the fact was noted, because it gave away a pretty major spoiler and sort of ruined the book’s big surprise for me.)  Wharton deftly skewers the nouveau-riche Americans of the day, holding Undine up against the old money (that’s mostly gone) standard set by Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles and very pointedly showing the reader all of the areas where Undine and her upstart sort fall short.  Of course, old society doesn’t escape either – Peter Van Degen represents the very worst of what the “old money” set can mutate into – and it costs his wife and Ralph Marvell their happiness.
• I found the name of Undine’s hometown – Apex – fascinating.  The word suggests a workaday kind of bland American outpost, but also the pinnacle of achievement.  And (spoilers!) Apex does turn out to be the pinnacle – for both Mr. Spragg, who never replicates the same success he had in Apex after the family arrives in New York – and for Undine, the fulfillment of whose wildest, most money-grabbing aspirations were rooted in Apex after all (despite her determination to be part of New York society at all costs).
• I’ve now read two Wharton novels, and each of them had odd, arguably unsatisfying, endings.  (Spoilers!)  The Age of Innocence, one of my favorite books, ends with a whimper – Newland Archer on a park bench, widowed, deciding that he’s not going to attempt to reunite with Ellen Olenska after all.  And The Custom of the Country, which probably should end with Undine getting her comeuppance once and for all (certainly that would be more satisfying for the reader) ends instead with her rolling in money and her billionaire husband realizing that he’s got to “lump it” or be cast off like his predecessors.  Oof.  Yet I still – literary achievement again, here – really enjoyed the ride, horrible undeserving anti-heroine and all.  Well done, Edith Wharton.  Slow clap.

In reading The Custom of the Country, Jen and I were joined by two other smart and prolific readers, both of whom share my impression that Undine is just. the. worst.

Thoughts from my friend Zandria:

It’s not bad enough to fall into the “Not Recommended” category, but it was impossible to like it when I didn’t care for ANY of the characters — they all annoyed me in one way or another. Although it seems silly to say this, the main character was such an awful person I wanted the story to be over so I could stop giving her more attention than she deserved.

(Zan’s full post here.)

And the always-insightful A.M.B. had great thoughts on the subjugation of women as discussed in the book:

And poor Undine (which I can admit despite hating her). She is the product of stifling times. The demeaning gender norms of her day persist to some extent in ours; however, in our century, a woman as ambitious as Undine could reasonably strive to be a prominent person in her own right, and not just the wife of one.

(Read her full post here – and congratulations to Mr. A.M.B. on opening his own law practice!  I wish him much success and joy in his career.)

Have you read any Edith Wharton?  What do you think of her depictions of Gilded Age New York?